Dems Upset After Trump Fires “The Peter Strzok of the State Department”

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday night, President Trump announced that he no longer had the fullest confidence in State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, and that he was sending the watchdog to the unemployment line. Predictably, the Democrats overreacted to this news with their usual hyperbolic hysteria, demanding that Trump turn over all records relating to Linick’s firing and accusing Trump of making the move to protect Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

A day after Trump fired Linick, House Democrats Eliot Engel and Bob Menendez opened an investigation into the decision, arguing that the Trump administration was guilty of a pattern of “politically motivated firing of inspectors general.” They wrote letters to the State Department, the White House, and Linick himself in which they expressed their suspicion that Linick had been probing wrongdoing on the part of Pompeo. The Democrats didn’t mention any specifics, leading one to think they are relying on rumor, innuendo, or perhaps their own imaginations.

“Such an action, transparently designed to protect Secretary Pompeo from personal accountability, would undermine the foundation of our democratic institutions and may be an illegal act of retaliation,” the lawmakers wrote.

Democrats were joined in their criticism by none other than Sen. Mitt Romney, who doesn’t miss a chance to virtue signal for the media.

“The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented; doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose,” Romney tweeted. “It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.”

Uh, no. There is no constitutionally-prescribed “balance” between the president and the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

Linick’s firing is probably long overdue, in fact. Political strategist Arthur Schwartz tweeted, “Good riddance. This guy was the Peter Strzok of the State Department.”

Indeed, as The New York Times notes, this guy was desperate to help Democrats impeach Trump last year:

Mr. Linick was spotlighted during the impeachment inquiry when he requested an urgent meeting with congressional staff members to give them copies of documents related to the State Department and Ukraine, signaling that the documents could be relevant to the House inquiry into whether President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden. The documents — a record of contacts between Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and Ukrainian prosecutors, as well as accounts of Ukrainian law enforcement proceedings — turned out to be largely inconsequential.

In other words, he scrambled to come up with something that would make him a “hero” like Alexander Vindman and Eric Ciaramella; instead, he merely embarrassed himself by handing Democrats documents that had nothing to do with anything.

Once again, Democrats are trying to strip this president of the powers that every previous president has enjoyed without doubt or question. Now they have their newest “scandal.” It’s just as empty and deceitful as all the rest of them.